A
Light in the Wilbernessby
Brian Van der Horst

If
you havent heard about Ken Wilber yet, you will. His body of work is
prodigious. Brilliant. Genius. You could also call him the Darwin, or William
James, or Plato of our times. He has written dozens of books, and edited scads
more. There are 271 web sites on the internet discussing, eulogizing and criticizing
him. Psycho- logical and philosophical masters like Huston Smith, Michael
Murphy, Rollo May, Daniel Goleman, Larry Dossey and Roger Walsh variously
call him the greatest thinker of our time, or call his magnum opus, Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality, one the most important books ever published. Our
own Robert Dilts often seems to have been influenced by him. And Robert McDonald,
who is said to be trying to memorizeA Brief History of Everything,
has been inspired to create a Wilberian-flavored psychology called psychoteleology.

So whats he got? What can Wilber contribute to our discipline? What is
worth knowing? Especially when reading any of his tomes seems like a monastic
practice in itself.

Ken Wilber is a modeller par excellence. Neither primarily nor exclu-
sively a behavioral modeller but a cognitive modeller. And a lot of people
think hes come up with the model of models. Naturally, his books cover
everything. But he is no instant intellectual jack-of-all-trades.

Wilbers
approach is the opposite of eclecticism, says Jack Crit- tenden, in his
foreword to The Eye of the Spirit. He has provided a coherent
and consistent vision that seamlessly weaves together truth claims from such
fields as physics and biology; the eco-sciences; chaos theory and systems
sciences; medicine, neuro-physiology, biochemistry; art, poetry, and aesthetics
in general; developmental psychology and a spectrum of psychotherapeutic endeavors,
from Freud to Jung to Piaget; the Great Chain theorists from Plato and Plotinus
in the West to Shankara and Nagarjuna in the East; the modernists from Descartes
and Locke to Kant; the Idealists from Schelling to Hegel; the postmodernists
from Foucault and Derrida to Taylor and Habermas; the major hermeneutic tradition,
Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer; the social systems theorists from Comte and
Marx to Parsons and Luhmann; the contemplative and mystical schools of the
great meditative traditions, East and West, in the worlds major religious
traditions. All of this is just a sampling.

Of
course this is an incomplete list. From his footnotes and bibliographies alone,
Wilber seems omniscient. And he keeps putting out a book a year.

I
love assignments like this. It doesnt pay anything, of course. But it
gives me the motivation to plow through this stuff that usually gets buried
by a dozen new science fiction novels in my reading pile. And as with meditation,
clean living and exercise, one feels so much better after reading a little
Wilber. So Ive pulled some of my favorite Wilbers off my bookshelves
to aid the novice reader in understanding what all the fuss is about.

Lets
do this chronologically. The Spectrum of Consciousness was rejected
by twenty publishers until it was finally published three years after he wrote
it at the age of 23, in long-hand in three months of 12-hour bouts. He had
no formal training in psychology. Most of his wisdom came from his own self-taught
quest for knowledge: reading, meditating and practicing. He looks like a bald-headed
ascetic now; but he started shaving it as a Zen filigree in his early 20s-after
having been captain of the football team and valedictorian in high school
in Nebraska. He had left a PhD in chemistry unfinished to write Spec- trum,
but when it came out in l977, James Fadiman, a founder of the Association
for Transpersonal Psychology said, Wilber has written the most sensible,
comprehensive book about consciousness since William James.

In
Spectrum, Wilber proposed a basic model of consciousness (re- produced
in Figure 1). Turn it upside down, and it looks a little like Diltss
neuro-logical levels. Essentially, Wilber was making one of the first complete
post-modern statements. He was able to create a synthesis of religion, philosophy,
physics and psychology that the world had not seen before. Much of this model
comes clear if you compare it with the basic map of therapies and the spectrum
that becomes apparent in his second book, a shorter, popularizing version
called No Boundary which, for added reader interest, had a lot of how-to-get-better
tips from his own experience in therapy and meditative practices.

Then he took
to proposing another, more recursive model of the development of consciousness-or
how to do it-entitled The Atman Project.

In this volume, his models (see Figures 2 & 3) offered a path of human development.
The theme of this book is basically simple: development is evolution;
evolution is transcendence; . . . and transcendence has as its final goal
Atman, or ultimate Unity Conscious- ness in only God.

I
suspect that, at this point, Wilber began thinking about co-evolution. He
may be compared with the primordial anaerobic bacteria which, when it had
produced enough oxygen on earth, had itself to evolve if it were to use that
oxygen. This led him to Up From Eden, in which gave us a neuro-linguistic,
philo-mystical Darwinism, or how human thinking-patterns, myths, and archetypes
generate a higher consciousness, as modelled in Figures 4 and 5. Those familiar
with the metaphorical work of Charles Faulkner will find some analogies here.

There are many
who start reading Wilbers works and abandon him quickly, dismissing him
either as too intellectual, too mystical, or too esoteric. Imagine the complaint
of a sensualist who had read only the above: with meditating two hours a day,
and all that self-taught book study and writing, has he really lived?

My answer is
to direct readers toward Grace and Grit, Wilbers moving personal
story of falling in love with his second wife, Treya, and the tragedy of discovering
her breast cancer a week after their wedding. This chronicle of the last years
of her life, when Wilber dropped everything to take care of his beloved, makes
a compelling statement of a man who has been profoundly moulded by the summits
and depths of the spectrum of human emotion.

Wilber eventually transcended these years, and was next remarked in print
around the publication of the first volume of his intended Kosmos
trilogy, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Here, as Tony Schwartz wrote in
his magnificent chapter about Ken Wilber in What Really Matters: searching
for wisdom in America, In the five years since his wifes death,
Wilber has put his heart into developing and refining his full spectrum model
of human potentials. He has not only addressed the levels of the spectrum-matter,
body, mind, soul and spirit-he has attempted to integrate ascending and descending
currents; interior and exterior; masculine and feminine; the individual and
the social.

Let me try to
walk you through an outline of his model. Take a look at Figure 6, The
four quadrants. Like the fried egg model of NLP, which divides
experience into external behavior, internal computations, internal states, and
beliefs, this model categorizes human experience into four categories, based
on the concept of developing holarchies. Not hierarchies, but nested, encompassing
frames of evolution, that speak of either interior or exterior worlds of the
individual or the collective.

Now look at Figure
7 for the types of thinkers that are working in each area. The right side being
descriptive, empirical, you get the phys- ical sciences and psychologies in
the upper, or individual right quadrant. The left side is interior, which interprets
experience, so you start out with Buddha, and develop up to Freud. The next
Figure, Validity claims (Figure 8), shows how each quadrant arrives
at its own truth. Finally Figure 9 shows the complete model. This is a map of
the integration of Wilbers previous books, and also, I believe the fruit
of his trials and transubstantiations of the previous decade. How did he arrive
at such an inclusive chart?

Well, if you look
at the various new paradigm theorists-from holists to eco-feminists,
from deep ecologists to systems thinkers-you find that all of them are offering
various types of holarchies, of hierarchies. . . .

So at one point
I simply started making lists of all of these holarchical maps-conventional
and new age, Eastern and Western, premodern and modern and postmodern-everything
from systems theory to the Great Chain of Being, from the Buddhist vijnanas
to Piaget, Marx, Kohlberg, the Vedantic koshas, Loevinger, Maslow, Lenski,
Kabbalah, and so on. I had literally hundreds of these things, these maps, spread
out on legal pads all over the floor.

At first I thought these maps were all referring to the same territory, so to
speak. I thought they were all different versions of an essentially similar
holarchy. There were just too many similarities and overlaps in all of them.
So by comparing and contrasting them all, I thought I might be able to find
the single and basic holarchy that they were all trying to represent in their
own ways. . . .

But the more I looked at these holarchies, the more it dawned on me that they
were actually four very different types of holarchies, for very different types
of holistic sequences.

In Figure 9, there are some examples of these types of sequence. Remember: evolution,
the Big Bang, starts in the middle, then goes off in wider nested wholes. A
holarchy represents a step of development that embraces, incorporates, and transcends
another set.

It is crucial
to realize that, in this model, each step of evolution is present on all four
axes, so that step number three, for example, represents the development of
early cells, prokaryotes, on the upper right; on the upper left, this equates
with irritability on the interior level of an organism. On the lower left, protoplasmic
culture is imminent, and on the lower right, a planetary, Gaia system can begin.
Each of the four axes are equally important for this step of evolution! See
Figure 10 for how the lower right axis would develop further.

What good is this model, and why is everybody so excited?

It now gives
us a way to be truly inter-disciplinary and less short- sighted in our individual
approaches to wisdom and evolution. With this model, it becomes apparent where
a given discipline-like NLP-has been short on neurology, immature in psychology,
clueless with the mythic and spiritual, social and political domains of human
experience. It is not that we were wrong, but we have just been working with
an incomplete model.

Personally, studying Wilber has given me a lot more respect and compassion for
other researchers in this field that previously I had thought were too far down
the track of their given predispositions. But now, when I encounter someone
who is exploring wuu-wuu land spirituality; or planetary consciousness with
referendums; or shamanism in the Andes; or MRI scans in the neuro-laboratory,
I can use Wil- bers maps to connect where they are with the other great
lines of human development.

In
my opinion, this tool is one of the greatest inventions ever proposed for
orienting human
beings toward their own evolution. But what do I know?

A Brief History
of Everything was written as a question-and-answer conversation, discussing
the main themes of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and making that huge
tome accessible. This book has become, I believe, Wilbers best-seller.
And nicely enough, this is where Wilber comes off the most rounded, all-around
human: a
funny, wise, ribald, irreverent, tender sage and raconteur. An example:

Q: Is there any sex in the book?

KW: With diagrams, actually.

Q: Youre kidding.

KW: Im kidding. But yes, sexuality is one of the main themes, and especially
its relation to gender.

Q: Sex and gender are different?

KW: Its common to use sex or sexuality to refer to the biological
aspects of human reproduction, and gender to refer to the cultural
differences between men and women that group up around the sexual or biological
differences. . .

Q: And these differences have their roots in the biological differences between
male and female?

KW: In part, in seems so. Hormonal differences, in particular. . . . I dont
mean to be crude, but it appears that testosterone basically has two, and only
two major drives: fuck it or kill it.

And
males are saddled with this biological nightmare almost from day one, a nightmare
women can barely imagine (except when they are given testosterone injections
for medical purposes, which drives them nuts. As one woman put it, I cant
stop thinking about sex. Please, cant you make it stop?)

His latest opus is The Eye of Spirit. Subtitled, An Integral Vision
for World Gone Slightly Mad, this is the most political of Wilbers
works. Here he tries to answer the question, what would a truly integral
culture look like, a culture that included, body, mind, soul, and spirit?
Wilber delves
into art, literature, and social trends like never before: if you are looking
for a model of what a world that everyone would like to belong to looks like,
with operating manual included, this book would be a good place to start
your explorations.

Some people prefer
delving directly into Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, but I recommend that
you begin with Wilbers later books rather than his earliest. Otherwise,
I recommend beginning with A Brief History; it is bound to seduce even
the most casual reader into plunging into the intoxicating revelations of all
the wise old trees to be found in the great magical Wilberness.

Books by Ken Wilber:

The Eye of
Spirit: an integral vision for a world gone slightly mad. Boston & London:
Shambhala, 1997. Hardback. 414pp.